Top all-time · #7380
The Archdruid Report
Personal blog · thearchdruidreport.blogspot.compoliticsculture
The Archdruid Report is a personal blog at thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com about politics and culture. Since 2009, 11 different Hacker News readers have linked it 19 times, most often “The Next Ten Billion Years”. The last post was in 2017, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (12) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this long-running blog for long-range essays on civilizational collapse and resource limits, notably 'The Next Ten Billion Years' and its follow-up on readers' reactions.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 12 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society
Most-linked posts?
- The Next Ten Billion Years2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2013-09-09
- /2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-12-19
What Hacker News says?
Were we ever? The timescale of human evolution to date is on the order of 2 million years or so since we branched from our common ancestor with chimpanzees. Somewhere around 80,000 years ago (plus or minus) we seem to have reached modern levels of cognitive ability, specifically, the capacity to keep 7 +/- 2 things in mind at the same time, as evidenced by the anthropological record -- stone artifacts and such. Writ…
Comment linking /2013/09/the-next-ten-billion-years.html
on “2014 Gates Annual Letter: Myths that block progress for the poor”Submitted Endgame: collapse is beginning in earnest as a story · 21 points
HN discussionThe piece was posted on The Archdruid Report ( https://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com ) and was called "The Next Ten Billion Years". In a bit of an unconventional move, the author has closed down the blog and is now selling the previously free articles as ebooks. There are a lot of valuable perspectives in his writing, so it might very well be worth the purchase. Most of it is not in the "short story format" that y…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What interesting thought did you read on HN but couldn't find later?”Submitted The Death of the Internet: A Pre-Mortem as a story · 19 points
HN discussionThe boom will be over in a few years, when it is no longer economically viable. http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2013/08/well-and-trul...
Comment linking /2013/08/well-and-truly-fracked.html
on “Groundwater Contamination May End the Gas-Fracking Boom ”Submitted Man, Conqueror of Nature, Dead at 408 as a story · 3 points
HN discussionIn a population overshoot scenario, the greater the population overshoot, the harder the crash. So, dark or not, yes, peaking world population well below present levels would put us in a much better position. Allowing more people to live endangers the future of technological civilization, if not the species. Sometimes a really long term vision is useful to contemplate: http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2013/09/…
Comment linking /2013/09/the-next-ten-billion-years.html
on “Norman Borlaug”Submitted The Next Ten Billion Years as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThere are a number of people foreseeing a collapse. Here is my favorite: http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/
Comment linking /
on “Isaac Asimov: Man of 7,560,000 Words (1969)”Submitted The Cybernetics of Black Knights as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThere's a follow-up post[1] where he talks more about the reactions: "A vision of a future in which civilizations, species and worlds follow life cycles like those of all other natural things didn’t leave them furious or depressed. Their comments instead featured such words as “comforted,” “delighted,” and “awed.” It’s easy, and also common, to mischaracterize such feelings as simple schadenfreude at the failure of…
Comment linking /2013/09/a-sense-of-homecoming.html
on “The Next Ten Billion Years”Submitted Dark Age America: Climate as a story · 1 points
HN discussionIncreasingly, though, organizational life is becoming about a world in which the higher-ups play "heads, I win; tails, you lose". Economics and the market economy, as instantiated, is about a number of things other than the usual platitudes of Pareto efficiency, wealth creation, and "freedom". I'd realized quite some time back that there's a fundamental relationship between economic and political power, a point driv…
Comment linking /2011/12/what-peak-oil-looks-like.html
on “How To Keep Your Best Programmers”Submitted After Money as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI don't see how access to medicine makes any difference Look over the history of the Industrial Revolution -- roughly 1750 - 1950. At the start of that we had no real working engines, transportation systems, concept of energy or thermodynamics, understanding of evolution or germ theory, and a whole host of other concepts, as well as practical technologies: steam engines, metalurgy, steel, chemicals, electricity, com…
Comment linking /2011/01/onset-of-catabolic-collapse.html
on “India blocking climate talks: Warsaw, Bangkok, and Kyoto negotiations”http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/ http://pchiusano.github.io/ (was http://pchiusano.blogspot.com/ ) http://www.daedtech.com/blog http://yosefk.com/blog/ http://oldurbanist.blogspot.com/
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What are some blogs of really smart people you check regularly?”"Oil and gas production from fracked wells thus starts out high but suffers ferocious decline rates—up to 90% in the first year alone." http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2013/02/the-end-of-sh...
Comment linking /2013/02/the-end-of-shale-bubble.html
on “Gas Boom Projected to Last for Decades”I remember coming across an innumerate post on this blog once before, bringing in some reality, and being told to leave. I note that there's no quantitative analysis in this post. His message seems to be that the sky is about to fall because some state governments aren't paying for food stamps, etc, which is reading a bit much into it. Here was that post: http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2008/07/trailing-edge.…
Comment linking /2008/07/trailing-edge-technologies.html
on “Endgame: collapse is beginning in earnest”Preparation and disaster-specific learning can only take you so far, but http://collapse.reddit.com is a serviceable overview of that part. http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com and http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/ have a more nuanced view of social and economic collapse; 1950s style "nuclear armageddon" style survivalism is unlikely to suffice in the real world. For the last nail in the coffin of "guns and independe…
Comment linking /
on “How would you survive society's collapse?”
